Proto/e/co/logics 002 THE FIELD IS OPEN

Hotel LONE | Rovinj | Croatia | 01 - 02 September 2012

PROTO/E/CO/LOGICS 002: THE FIELD IS OPEN Envisioned as an open platform for rethinking increasingly complex
landscape of architecture and asymptotic cultures, symposium PROTO/E/CO/LOGICS 002: The Field is Open, foregrounds
the necessity for resilient bounding of global-local, generic-particular relations and transference, a navigational system
for which increasingly accelerated scientific discoveries within the manifest image of the world are taken not as
obstacles but as opportunities for further synthesis.

Through expansion in material science, cloud computing, transformations in constructability and manufacturing (such
as ongoing revolution with 3d printing) and internet of things, boundaries of architecture are becoming fuzzy and the
Field is increasingly Open. In recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and understanding that
the agency spawns beyond human, provides a new ground for addressing design ecology. Unlike the principles of total
holism that have characterized earlier ecological thinking, what this kind of synthetic approach offers is resilience
and redundancy of transient boundaries, with increased ability for interweaving contingent agencies. The role of those
boundaries is not any more to enclose space, but rather to form tissue for osmotic exchange.

Proto/e/co/logics 001

SPECULATIVE MATERIALISM IN ARCHITECTURE

Hotel LONE | Rovinj | Croatia | 06 - 07 August 2011

PROTO/E/CO/LOGICS 001: SPECULATIVE MATERIALISM IN ARCHITECTURE symposium curated by Alisa Andrasek and Bruno Juričić and held on 6-7 August 2011 unraveled new and speculative trends in architecture moving beyond innocent and reductive approaches to ecology as in notions of "sustainability" and "green". Let us remember the words of Slavoj Žižek who claimed that the so-called "balance of nature" is in itself a myth considering that catastrophes have always been a constituent element of natural history. Thus, the question of ecology in architecture can be posed only as an opening, a bridge between organic and inorganic, bridge between human world of categories and the independent real world. This opening generates different positions about what architecture really is, what its objects are, and what its manners of cognition are.

Rather than acting from a position of idealization with regards to nature, the ambition of the symposium was to abandon old models of thought which are manifested as eco-relationality and instead produce a new speculative image of the matter driven by abstract mathematical models. And furthermore, it teased out speculative definitions of architecture as a product of contingent events, material histories, information webs, and networks of anonymous forces. That is to say, the symposium showed how the recent experiences in architecture aspire to approach the issue of design within a "denaturalised material ecology" in a way that is not simply determined by the continual transformation of inherited forms and traditions of the discipline of architecture but which draws on a universal account of matter – matter as information, an account enabled by computation. Thus, geological, climactic, biotic, technological, aesthetic and even psychic factors are conceived as active agents - or, contributors to a "proto/e/co/logical" posture toward architecture.

Last year contributors included Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, with his bold proposals of Parametricism as the new universal movement in architecture, Francois Roche's hypnotic talk on new kind of synthetic (un)naturals through Eros[vs]machinism, one of the most intriguing and delirious thinkers Reza Negarestani's talk on questioning whether Ecology is possible after Copernicus, Urbanomic's Robin Mackay's expansion on this topic with adaptation to the acute developments in (computational) architecture, talk of the veteran on all things ecological in architecture Sanford Kwinter, deeply inspiring talk by Ed Keller on Agents of Revolutionary time, Adrian Lahoud's presentation on Post-Traumatic urbanism and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto's talk on Architectural Behaviorology. Such contrasting myriad of facets laid ground for crystallizing fresh ideas that continued beyond bounds of our actual event.